If you were online many years ago, before the internet first became a household word, maybe you can remember how jumbled and chaotic all those early webpages were. Everybody wanted to put everything they possibly could on their sites. It was like a giant collage of content, and the net surfer didn’t know where to aim the mouse first!

Now, we’re in the era commonly known as “web 2.0.” This is the age of eBay, blogs, social networking, wikis and instant messaging. The web has changed, and web design has changed along with it.

Web 2.0 design is the new and improved version of the internet. Gone are the endless, long scrolling screens, or the sites with tiny texts and bland colors. Web 2.0 design is simpler and bolder. As a webmaster, you should be hip to these changes to improve your internet marketing. To that end, here are a few of the best web design sites where you can hone up on web 2.0 design ideas.

Web Design From Scratch: http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com

Web design is one of the more mystifying parts of starting your own website. Unless you are a “design person,” you may not know much about what looks good or bad, and what works and doesn’t work. This site is simple and straightforward, and has lots of easy explanations with screen shot examples.

The site is in a simple blog format. Along the left sidebar there are topics like “basics,” “design process” and “site architecture.” It not only discusses basic design principles (i.e. which designs work best), but that actual nuts and bolts of doing your own design in HTML or CSS. Everything is thoroughly covered, and the site walks you through each process step-by-step. The site also has a variety of tutorials that make it even easier.

Web Design From Scratch is a great general overview of the steps you need to take. It also shows you all the different options you have to choose from.

Photoshop Lab: http://www.photoshoplab.com

This site is colorful and easy to navigate. It has screenshots showing you exactly what to do, and simple tutorials that any idiot could use. With Photoshop Lab you can tackle some of the more complicated graphics programs that might now be intimidating.

The site has tips for using different programs, the latest news and reviews in the web design world, and a handy list of links to other sites with tutorials and tips. You can also search the site for specific information.

Photoshop Lab is a more topic-oriented site, so it’s most useful when you’re looking for some specific information about your design.

Template World: [http://www.templateworld.com]

Here’s a site that you can really use. This site offers you templates that you can use for your sites. This takes some of the headache out of having to design your site pixel for pixel.

Along the sidebar they list different categories. If, for example, you have a pet-oriented website, you can click on the “animals” category, and it shows you the most popular templates.

Template World has a huge variety of great ready-made website designs, but there’s one catch – it’s not free. You have to become a member, and membership runs about $50 for a half-year. But, that’s still cheaper than hiring a designer to make it for you.

We really shouldn’t be complaining about how tough it is; designing a website has never been easier than it is today. You can do it all by yourself with any one of these handy Web 2.0 design websites – they’re the best.

What do you mean by SEO Web Design asked a new client of mine?

I had just been reviewing her site and noticed that the company who had previously designed it and it has to said, had created a visually eye-catching website, had however made some basic errors in their haste to please her.

To start from the beginning she had contacted me after she had come across one of my articles. It’s funny how life works though because, that in itself would not have prompted her to get in touch, but a friend of hers who I had been doing some SEO work for had got in touch with her after about 6 years.

And of course they got to discussing life and work etc; and to cut a long story short her friend recommended that she get in touch with me.

Now her frustration was that she should have had every ingredient for success. Her site was in a relatively niche market, competition wasn’t that high and yet after paying out a sizeable chunk of money on getting her website professionally designed, her site was nowhere to be found on Google.

So what could possibly be going wrong?

A Brief Background

There is an old saying in Internet Marketing that good designers make bad SEO experts. Why? You may well ask.

The truth is that in my experience of the last 10 years in online marketing, most of the designers that I have worked with and come across have sharpened their design skills on HTML, XHTML, Javascript and CSS.

A lot of them have been in the forefront of the web design industry leading the way in site design and architecture but therein lies the root problem of the story.

The online marketing industry moves at a frenetic pace. What was once a ‘de facto’ standard is now old hat and consigned to ‘wheely’ bin of Internet marketing.

Faced with the constant flux of new ideas and innovations, a good designer already inundated with back orders has little choice but to concentrate on pleasing the clients’ esoteric eye.

He/she may have picked up a few SEO tidbits along the way either in meeting rooms or from beleaguered colleagues rushing from one project to the next but very seldom do you come across a good designer who knows and understands the impact of SEO upon web design.

This is not meant to be a criticism nor is meant to decry the genuine efforts of the design community at large but merely to point out that it is quite difficult to serve two very demanding masters at the same time.

There are sadly many who miss the point altogether, tearing their proverbial hair out when faced with their client’s low keyword ranking despair and frustration.

The backdrop to this that millions of ‘would-be’ entrepreneurs join the Internet juggernaut on a daily basis in search of financial freedom. These aspiring businessmen and women are usually at their most vulnerable when first starting out.

Excited and eager to get started, they overlook the basic principles of marketing and are often taken in by smooth-talking salesmen flashing dollar signs in front their imaginative eyes.

“Get a website! You need a website! You must have a website! Put up a few pages and hey presto before you know it you will be the envy of all your friends and neighbours!” seems to be the common thread.

Getting back to my client, she looked at me fairly blankly when I said that SEO web design meant that the design of a website had more to do with following certain guidelines than how good it looked to her.

“But I thought that if a site was well designed that people would like it and buy from it” she exclaimed almost daring me to disagree with her.

Yes, I answered disarmingly and gently proceeded to point out that without visitors having a great looking website wouldn’t be doing her any favours at all.

SEO Web Design – The Basics

Which brings me neatly to the crux of this article i.e. SEO web design. So, let’s take a look at a simple layout in the first instance.

Say you have a header/logo at the top of the page followed by some descriptive text that says “Welcome to my web…., followed by some pictures and the left hand side contains a column with some navigation links in it etc, etc;

Now search engines like Google scan a web page from left to right beginning at the very top. And as in our example above since most websites have a left hand column containing navigation links, Google will automatically view the content of the links column before it gets to the body of your page.

There are simple methods to counter this and force Google to read your main body content first and this why it is very important to get SEO Web Design at the very start of the design phase.

Then there’s another critical factor that determines the ranking of your web pages and that is targeting the wrong keyword. Get that wrong initially and you can almost kiss goodbye to getting decent rankings.

Now how many designers know just these basic facts?

My client had started to see the picture. In her eagerness to get her business going she had gone to the first person that she had come across.

The company had a good portfolio of sites and more importantly for her the cost was roughly near the budget that she was looking for and so without further thought she decided to go for it.

2 years down the road and with just a handful of sales, she was very close to quitting.

Her dreams had given way to despair and far from being the envy of her friends and neighbors, she had even reached the point of not looking at nor caring about her site anymore.

The question is, was she too late to do anything about it?

Here is a very simple SEO web marketing trick you can us in your articles that can easily yield a lot of extra targeted traffic for you and your site.

Some folks are not aware of the fact that search engines place a lot of importance on Italics and bold within the body of an article. It usually means an important reference and is very strong evidence of what the page is about which is one of the main objectives of search engines.

Before the Google search engine came along and revolutionized search, making it so much more efficient, a common practice with many web sites was to guess popular keywords and then stuff their sites with as many of them as possible without caring whether they had the content for it or not. The whole idea was to get very high traffic and then expose that traffic to their advertisements in the hope that they will catch a significant enough percentage to make money.

The result was that searching for anything online was a very frustrating affair. Google came in with their Page Rank link based system and suddenly you could find exactly what you were looking for in seconds instead of hours. The search engine algorithm considers many other factors. It is all top secret except that people often take a close look at sites that rank highly and they notice things. One of the aspects on which a lot of importance is placed is on words and phrases within the main body of the content on a page that is either bold or italics.

This is something important for anybody involved in SEO web marketing articles to consider because it could get you plenty of targeted traffic from search engines for very little effort put in.